The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Buckle up, this one is pretty long. I finished this book a few days ago and the impression it made on me was so visceral, I had to wait to write about it. When I consider what it takes to be a classic, regardless of the medium, my first thought is timelessness. Will this item stand the test of time and all that entails? I believe that the term classic is bandied about too often and too frivolously. We call anything that we like in that moment a classic and I think that is inaccurate at best. I did […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

Capital ‘L’ literature puzzles me as I often feel that it’s a giant waste of time while I’m in the middle, but then I get to the end and reflect on it, and I realize that having read the book was worthwhile. This sentiment couldn’t be more true than my feeling on finishing “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.” On a surface perspective, I read 350 pages in which nothing really happened and the characters went nowhere. But on a deeper inspection, the pages roil with meaning and even though the characters ultimately don’t have much of an arc, I walked […]

The Lonely Hearts Hotel by Heather O’Neill

I think I might need to start making a list of where I heard about certain books, that way once they are finally available at the e-library I will know why I wanted to read them in the first place. This book overall was fairly good, but it was strange an a bit manipulative and I wonder who told me to read it. “The Lonely Hearts Hotel” is a book set in and around the Great Depression and follows the lives of two orphans in Montreal. Rose and Pierrot are abused by the nuns tasked with caring for them, but […]

64. Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942 by Ian W. Toll (5 stars) The Pacific Crucible examines the naval war in the Pacific theater of WWII from Pearl Harbor to Midway, and traces its origins back to the naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan’s seminal book, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. This is the first in a nonfiction trilogy about the Pacific theater of WWII. The second, The Conquering Tide, was published in 2015. I think it’s a fairly stellar book about half the time, alternating between both the Japanese and American sides, and going into a […]

Share the post "A war, depression, and a sociopath. And three other books not about the 2016 election."

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed

There is a complex tapestry of finely woven threads that make up this story; each one reaching back into antiquity, becoming drab of color and less distinct. The tapestry details the modern world, and without these threads, it’s impossible to understand the context in which we live. This book is an attempt to explain this tapestry, and details its creation via the economic systems of Great Britain, France, Germany and the United States. It follows their development in the 19th century, through WWI and it’s tumultuous aftermath and through the implosion of the Great Depression and rebirth following WWII. Which […]

Share the post "“You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!”"

The Pearl by John Steinbeck

The Pearl is a fairly simple tale, a parable, of the destruction wrought upon a family by colonialism, capitalism, and wealth. Kino is a hardworking, but impoverished, man who works as a pearl diver. When his infant son, Coyolito, is stung by a scorpion, Kino seeks help from the village doctor. They are turned away for lack of funds, and Kino and is wife, Juana, make the best of the situation with an herbal poultice. He returns to the ocean in the hopes that he’ll find a pearl that will afford his son the medical attention he needs, and discovers […]

Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by H. W. Brands

I’ll get this out of the way at the outset: I didn’t like this book. Why give it four stars, then, you ask? Well, it’s not a bad book. There’s nothing wrong with it, per say. I just didn’t like it. It took me eight months to read it. I’d like to blame it on the fact that my family increased by one 7 pound boy during that time, but there’s no getting around the fact that I simply struggled to get through this. I started reading this after I finished Team of Rivals back in January, and I’ve read […]

Share the post "Someone quiet Franklin, I want to hear more about Eleanor."